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This week and next week @skillsmatter (Feb 20-24)

You lucky people; it’s time for another weekly round up at Skills Matter. What happened this week? What videos can we watch? And what is in store for you next week?

The ice and snow are gone, and I think it’s only fair to give credit where credit’s due: our experts. This week we had in residence Alberto Brandolini delivering Eric Evans’ DDD Immersion Workshop, and “Python for Rookies” author Russel Winder giving his Python workshop. Both were a huge hit with their workshop delegates — and Alberto will be returning to Skills Matter on April 23, with Russel Winder hot on his heels on May 15.

Allan Kelly joined us on Monday for an interactive session on Dialogue Sheets, a new tool for retrospectives — because this was an hands-on event, I don’t have a video to share with you from the talk. However, we are having a launch party for Allan Kelly’s new book! Join us with Allan on March 21 at Skills Matter and hear about Business Patterns for Software Development, and get Allan to sign your copy of this book.

By mid-week at Skills Matter we had Damjan Vujnovic delivering a Javascript Coding Kata on Wednesday evening. Unfortunately, this is another event with nothing to show you on video! But you’re not completely out of luck, Damjan comes to Skills Matter on April 30 to deliver Gojko Adzic’s Test Driven Development Workshopas well as his ownAdvanced JavaScript Workshopon May 17. If you ask very nicely, we’ll even ask Damjan for another In the Brain talk when he’s next at Skills Matter.

Next Week:

Free talk: London Cassandra User Group – Cassandra as an email storage system and CQL Then & Now (Feb 20)

>Cassandra London kicks off 2012 with a talk on implementing Cassandra as an email storage system and what’s new in CQL. Rustam Aliyev share his experiences of implementing Cassandra as an email storage system at Elastic Inbox, and Courtney Robinson — a regular member of the London Cassandra User Group — gives an update on what’s new with CQL.Feb 20: sign up here.

Delivered by NServiceBus core developer Andreas Ohlund, Udi Dahan’s “Enterprise Development with NServiceBus” course teaches you all the ins-and-outs of NServiceBus – the most popular, open-source service bus for .NET – now updated for NServiceBus 3.0. Used in production since 2006, NServiceBus is now used in hundreds of companies in finance, healthcare, retail, SaaS, web 2.0, and more. From basic one-way messaging, through publish/subscribe; providing solutions from transactions to cross-machine scale out; this hands-on course will show you how simple distributed systems development can be.

This month’s meeting for the Groovy Grails User Group will be all about deploying Grails applications. Several community members will describe how they go about ensuring up-time during upgrades, using a Platform-as-a-Service (CloudBees), and more.Feb 20: sign up here.

A common problem when designing service oriented architectures is that events going across services tend to be very large in terms of properties they carry. This has the negative effect of making development tougher, testing harder and deployment a risky operation. In this talk, NServiceBus and Enterprise Software Expert Andreas Ohlund will analyse the checkout process of an online retailer to identify some of the misconceptions that lead to fat events. Finally we’ll look at techniques that will help you keep your events small and fit for the purpose thus mitigating the problems above.Feb 20: sign up here.

Free talk: London Ruby User Group Lightning Talks (Feb 21)

As is now traditional, we devote the February London Ruby User Group meeting to lightning talks. We have James Coglan giving a talk on Websockets, a talk on capistrano extensions, Richard Livsey on removing authentication from your models and Harry Marr on Custom documentation generators.Feb 21: sign up here.

As well as LJC ligtning talks will be Fabiane Nardon on achieving zero downtime in a JavaEE application is not easy, showing several tools, tips and tricks to get there, and Yara Senger & Vinicius Senger showing how you can use Java EE and open-source hardware, like Arduino, to automatize your house. Using jHome, a complete Java EE 6 API for home automation, you can control lamps, wall sockets, electric gates and doors using Web App and Twitter.Feb 21: sign up here.

Free talk: Neo4J User Group:Neo4j in a .NET world (Feb 22)

This month, Tatham Oddie will be coming from Australia to present at the Neo4j User Group on Neo4j with .NET, and will cover the Neo4j client we have built for .NET, hosting it all in Azure and why our queries were 200ms slower in the cloud, and how we fixed it.

Tatham will present a case study, explaining -what our project is, -why we chose a graph db, -how we modelled it to start with, -how our first attempts at modelling were wrong and what we’re doing now.

Join us at this great Neo4J meetup and get a chance to win a ticket to the Progressive NoSQL Tutorials to boot! Follow #prognosql on twitter on the day of the event, to find out more!Feb 22: sign up here.

Martine Devos’ two day ScrumMaster and Estimation class will teach you the fundamental principles of Scrum, qualifying you as a Certified ScrumMaster. Leading a Scrum team is radically different to traditional project management. Rather than plan, instruct, and direct, the leader of a Scrum team (called a ScrumMaster) facilitates, coaches and leads.

In this intensive and highly interactive workshop, you will learn to deal with the obstacles that confront Scrum teams. You will also put theory into practise through a variety of exercises and take-aways to use with co-workers. Upon successful completion of the course, you will be enrolled as a Certified ScrumMaster. This includes a two-year Scrum Alliance membership, where additional ScrumMaster-only material and information is available.

That’s more than enough for one week! As always, make sure you follow @skillsmatter and @jameschesters on Twitter in to join the discussion, and be the first to hear when the Skillscast videos are published. We also have some special Twitter raffles next week, so keep your eyes peeled for a chance to win a place on some great events. See you at Skills Matter next week.